


Have you been half asleep?

by fannishliss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-26 15:16:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean doesn't like the latest Hunt.  Also, he commits Voter Fraud.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have you been half asleep?

**title: Have you been half asleep?**  
author: [](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/)**fannishliss**  
rating: pg, gen  
spoilers: current through end of s7.  
length: 1500 words or so

Summary: Dean doesn't like the latest Hunt.  Also, he commits Voter Fraud.

This story is for the awesome [](http://desertport.livejournal.com/profile)[**desertport**](http://desertport.livejournal.com/).  Sorry it took so long!  It was for a Dean prompt fest as well. 

~~

Ganking Kermit wasn't really Dean's idea of a good time.

Back in the day, he could blow away evil sons of bitches with the best of them.  Shoot first, notch the journal later.

What was this world coming to, Dean would like to know, when you're knee deep in swampy water, waiting for a soft slimy hand to grab your ankle and pull you down toward a widely grinning face?  

"Sam!" Dean yelled.

"Yeah?" he heard from a ways over.

"Fall back," Dean heard himself yell.

"Fall back?" Sam questioned.

"Yeah," Dean answered.  He heard a soft splashing as his brother approached.  He carefully extracted himself from the murky waters and made for solid ground, meeting Sam there.

The darkness was alive with the chirping of all kinds of crickets, katydids and whatnot.  Tree frogs maybe.  Who the hell knew.  Maybe the Kermits could sing. Dean felt his heart, already heavy, drop two feet lower.

"Damn it, Sammy," Dean muttered.  

Sam just peered at him, mournful.  Sam knew better than to ask.

~~

Since the Leviathans, since Purgatory, the Hunt had really, you know, kind of sucked.

Demons?  You wanna kill demons?  How could you, Dean thought to himself, when some of your best allies were demons.  When you yourself were nearly a demon once.  When your brother was in line to be the king of demons.  When all demons were, was human souls driven mad by torture.  Where was the joy in taking them down?  Where was the freaking justice of it, any of it?  

Leviathans weren't any better. Worse in fact.  Whatever dripped down into Purgatory got stewed in the muck there for however long it took before it trickled back up, oozing through the cracks the quasi-Pocalypsoi had left in the shattered borderlands.

Seems like the world could only take so much saving before it got harder and harder for it to bounce back.

Dean couldn't really complain, since he and Cas had shimmied out through just such a crack.

Monsters? What were monsters?  What were humans?  What were Angels?  It was all too much for Dean.  Hunting was all he'd ever known, all he'd ever been really good at.  Saving people -- hunting things.  Yeah, the family business -- but it meant something to Dean.  No one knew about his war, no one knew enough about him to think of him as a hero, but he fought the good fight anyway, or tried, and that kept him going -- for a while.  A long time, really.  Bit by bit it all started to crumble.

~~

The holding cell wasn't crowded on a Tuesday, and no one had vomited on Dean's boots-- yet.  Worst thing about the slammer, in Dean's opinion, was the stink of other guys who didn't wash frequently enough to keep the reek of their bad habits from spoiling the air all around them.  Dean's nostrils had faced a lifetime of abuse, but small-time criminals could give ghouls a run for their money.

The cage door rattled.  Sammy was all cleaned up, in his nicest suit and sourest expression for the jailor.

"This is outrageous," Sam fumed, tiny bit of heat to sell the lie. "Mr. Hammett is well within his rights as a voter advocate."

"Whatever," the jailor said, just another cog in the machine.

Dean shook himself out and lumbered past the uniform, stretching his lips wide in a smarmy grin that didn't warm his eyes.    
   
"So," Sam said on the way to the new motel, two towns over. "Head back to the swamp tonight, gank some Kermits?"

Dean felt kind of sick at the thought.   He looked out the window and tried to breathe.  Cornfields rolled by, sparse stands of trees, ugly housing developments.  

Silence thickened in the car.

"Two men dead, Sammy,"  Dean complained.  

"Yeah," Sam agreed.

Silence swelled again, till Sam said, "Did you know the American Bullfrog has reached plague proportions in the West?  Bullfrogs devour all the smaller frogs until none are left."  

"Mm," Dean acknowledged.

~~

The Impala rolled along. On the radio, a classic rock station blared Judas Priest.

Breaking the law, breaking the law, breaking the law, breaking the law.

Breaking the law, breaking the law, breaking the law, breaking the law.

Otherwise, silence.

Finally there was the crunching of gravel as the Impala pulled in to the new motel.  Sam found an inconspicuous parking place and turned off the engine.

Dean didn't move and neither did Sam.

"I'm gonna call Kim."  

"The Pixie?"   Kim was a tiny firebrand vegan environmentalist.  Her group, or "cell," as she preferred to call it, had never been suspected in the deaths at the construction site, but Kim and her friend Jen had shown up at the courthouse anyway with duct tape across their mouths, holding up signs painted with killer bulldozers and "Death in the Swamp!!!" in blood-red letters.

In Dean's experience, nobody was really all that fond of a swamp outside Cajun country, and he didn't get how brandishing signs that read "Death in the Swamp!!!" would help matters.

"She has some legitimate contacts…" Sam said, as Dean scoffed.  "Look, Dean, you don't wanna gank those critters, then we're gonna have to keep the swamp from being bulldozed.  Kim is our last resort."

Dean frowned.  

"You gonna tell her about the Kermits?"  Dean asked softly.

"No, I'm not gonna tell her about the Kermits!" Sam sighed.  "She'd just want to, I don't know, 'encounter' them or photograph them at least."

"You know," Dean said, picking his nails, "if the god-damned Fairies -- I mean, the real ones, not the Pixie -- if they'd just pull their weight, stupid Kermits wouldn't be out there trying to drown guys."

"Yeah," Sam said.  "Where are the Fairies when you actually need them?"

Dean looked at Sam a little sideways.   "I'm thinking, we should call them."

"You're kidding me.  You microwaved one of them!" Sam said.

"Yeah, and I shot a few of them too.  Still.  I feel like this is their turf."

"You wanna deliberately contact the Fair Folk and ask them for a favor."

"No, I want to point out that this swamp is gonna get bulldozed if they don't throw a few glamours.  It's their move."

Sam's eyebrows crawled so high, Dean imagined them floating above his head like a cartoon.  

"It could work."

"Yeah?"  Dean said hopefully.

"Maybe."  

It was a chancy thing, but how many chancy things had they pulled off in the past?  At least a few.   A little less blood on Dean's hands.  An uneasy allegiance, maybe even an opening for diplomacy -- Dean liked the thought of it.

~~

"These are a little cleaner than the first batch -- hopefully they'll get through this time," Dean said, handing out a new batch of absentee voter ballots to be mailed by the men over the course of the next few days.  The street addresses were plausible enough, and when he'd run out of old bandmates  of Santana, he'd moved on to Gipsy Kings.    
   
"Gracias, Dean," Miguel said.  "What about the Kermits?" he asked.

Dean poofed out a long breath and looked Miguel in the eye.  "We called the cops on them.  And by cops I mean, tiny little shits with nasty bitey teeth."

"Como?"  Miguel said, confused.

"Fairies," Dean said. "We conjured them last night.  It was all kinds of trippy, but nobody's an ass, so…."

Miguel narrowed his eyes but nodded. He stuck out his hand and Dean shook it.

"Adios, amigo," Dean said, kind of relishing the phrase.  

Miguel just shook his head and went back to work.  

~~

"Kim says the construction site has been plagued with mechanical breakdowns -- in fact the holding company experienced a massive computer failure that nearly bankrupted them.  The men have moved on -- right after they cast their ballots."

 Sam read off the email and Dean felt a knot inside him start to let go. Somewhere slimy, Kermits were smiling, and Dean was okay with that.  

~~

The sky was scattered with clouds, some white and puffy, some heavy and and opaque.  A thunderstorm was coming.  Not Dean's problem -- not every damn thing was Dean's problem.  Lightning forked down in the distance, and Dean drove toward it, the blue sky, the black clouds and the white.

 

###

Special note -- my husband, who is my beta, recognized my monster.  He is awesome that way.    The Kermits appear to be an American colony of Vodyanoy, as represented in the first picture on [this wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodyanoy) \-- but Kermits are smilier. :D  
  



End file.
